Are AI careers limited to data scientists and analyst? Is there any scope for general IT business analyst to work on AI projects? If so, what skills, courses or certifications might help? Ironically AI doesn’t seem to answer this question too well!
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In my professional life it was common for business leaders to lack comprehension of how ML actually works, so they were often over promising or under funding projects. Likewise, engineering teams often chased shiny technology objects, regardless of whether or not there was a business need or justification for the investment. Someone who knows enough about both worlds to liaise between them can be very valuable. To get there from the business side, it could be very useful to try to get through the Machine Learning specialization, as it has a broad scope of ML/AI technologies. It will require that you bring or develop some math (including some stats and probability) and programming competencies, but honestly I think the level required would prove useful to a business analyst career anyway.
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Thats a very useful reply. Thanks. So seems like ML is the way to go for general BAs in today’s AI landscape.
Out of curiosity, is ML mostly confined to ANI (narrow intelligence), or is ML used in Gen AI and AGI as well?
Machine Learning is the general overall category for all of those methods.
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+1 for @TMosh ‘s reply above.
The way I think of it, the technology that powers Gen AI, Attention and Transformer, were developed to overcome certain challenges and limitations with an approach called Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), which evolved to overcome certain challenges with earlier Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), which proved to be better suited for some types of applications than straight feed forward Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) which act rather like a collection of linear or logistic regression expressions stacked together. Can you understand how Gen AI works without knowing how logistic regression is implemented in a neural network? Sort of, but not really.
If you take a look at the course overviews here ( https://coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-introduction ) you can see that the Deeplearning Machine Learning specialization will familiarize you with the ideas that are the foundation of what Gen AI is built on. Additionally, it covers techniques for what is called unsupervised machine learning, or clustering, which are quite useful in certain business applications eg customer segmentation. If you have zero programming background it will definitely take some work, but once you can handle that, it will be a nice collection of knowledge and skills to add to your toolbox. HTH
EDIT
I notice a recently announced intro Python class from Deeplearning that might be useful if you don’t have programming skills already.
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Thanks, I have exposure to programming back in the days, at least 15 years back. Guess I will check out ML introduction and maybe even Python if it is interesting. End of day, I need to update skill set to include AI into business analysis and project management!